Levon Ter Petrosian, Opposition Rally, Liberty Square, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007

RFE/RL reports that the Armenian Revolutionary Federation — Dashnaktsutyun (ARF-D) has strongly criticized the speech made by former president Levon Ter Petrosian last week. The party probably has more grounds than most to speak out against the first president given that they were banned for part of his rule with many of their senior leaders and activists imprisoned.

Hrant Markarian, the de facto head of the nationalist party’s worldwide governing body, also insisted that Ter-Petrosian stands no chance of winning next year’s presidential election. He said Armenians are unhappy with their current and former rulers and only trust third forces like Dashnaktsutyun.

[…]

“I very much want Levon Ter-Petrosian to stand in the elections,” Markarian told RFE/RL in an interview. “If the past 17 years have not been enough to make him a realist, then let him run and find his real place in this society.”

[…]

Markarian stressed that while his party agrees that the Armenian government’s “policy of economic monopolization has reached its climax” it believes that the root causes of this and other fundamental problems facing the country date back to Ter-Petrosian’s 1991-1998 presidency. “That speech could have been somewhat convincing if he had started it by evaluating his years [in power,]” he said.

Dashnaktsutyun was bitterly opposed to Ter-Petrosian throughout that period, resenting his liberal economic policies and what it saw as a soft line on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and relations with Turkey. Ter-Petrosian controversially banned the party in 1994, accusing it violating Armenia’s laws and running a secret death squad. The ban was lifted shortly after his dramatic resignation in 1998. Dashnaktsutyun has since been among the most loyal allies of his successor, Robert Kocharian.

Markarian, who was among Dashnaktsutyun leaders jailed by the Ter-Petrosian administration, claimed that the ex-president suggested no remedies to right the wrongs mentioned in his speech. “His speech contained [words like] destroy, break up, eliminate,” he said. “But there was nothing on what to create.”

“Only a person detached from reality for ten years could make such a speech. You can’t change anything in this country by means of extremism,” he added.

The full post is available on the Armenia Election Monitor 2008 Blog.